Wednesday, January 13, 2010

eBird switches to a new database server

eBirders

For the past several months we've been preparing to migrate the massive eBird database and all the front-end functionality over to a newer, more powerful server. Thanks to the work of all our IS staff, that migration was completed yesterday, and all went smoothly. eBird users woke up on Tuesday morning with lightning-fast response times on most of the eBird output tools, and the My eBird pages.

Sometimes we have to spend time working on the back-end of eBird and prioritize that over creating new and exciting functionality for the front-end users. Now that we have eBird back on a solid database platform, we can proceed forward with much of the development we've been putting off for some time. We hope to focus over the next several months on making world-wide data entry a reality for eBird users, as well as unveiling a few neat tools we have up our sleeves.

The changes we made were two: the hardware and the operating system of the machine hosting the database. The hardware is an IBM x3650 M2, with dual quad-core 2.93 GHz processors, and 64GB of RAM. We are attached to an EMC storage array where most of the database is housed. Current size for the database (not only eBird but all monitoring projects including PFW and GBBC, is 142 GB. That includes all the tables, data warehouses, indexes, everything. The database is still Oracle 10g Rel 2 Enterprise Edition (unchanged,) but now running on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.3.